In this book, Michael Schoenfeldt adds an important study to the ongoing
examination of renaissance ideas of the body. The body we find here is not
the leaky, carnivalesque body of Gail Kern Paster's The Body Embarrassed,
or the dead, flayed body of Jonathan Sawday's The Body Emblazoned.
Rather, Schoenfeldt takes a close second look at the everyday, living body
as an arena of self-control as defined by Galenic physiology, classical
ethics, and reformation theology. In doing so, he offers a study at times
complementary and at times corrective to recent work on the topic. Unlike
some historicist readings of renaissance literature, Schoenfeldt's concerns
itself not with what respective texts ostensibly hide. Instead, this book
reaches back to refresh our understanding of a discourse important to the
four writers studied, an understanding of the self that was a "brilliantly
supple discourse of selfhood and agency" (11).

Galenic physiology provides a system integrating the material body with
reason and the emotions. It associates the four elements (earth, air, water,
and fire) with the four humours the make up the body (melancholy or black
bile, blood, phlegm, and yellow bile). Individuals must work to balance
the humours within themselves by regulating their diets; imbalance results
in both physical and psychological abnormality. Ingestion, then, becomes
a matter of anxious introspection. Schoenfeldt finds in this self-discipline
a space for individual rather than state control: subjects must be regents
of themselves in order to attain good health; the person who lacks control
of self indeed lacks self. Schoenfeldt further explores a tension between
two coexisting but contradicting models of self-control: the stoic elimination
of passion and the Christian direction of passion.

Schoenfeldt is at his most confrontational in his chapter on Spenser, where
he accomplishes an important re-reading of the second book of The Faerie
Queene, and particularly the episodes in the Castle of Alma and the
Bower of Bliss. He responds to recent Freudian readings by Stephen Greenblatt
and David Miller with the jolting but convincing argument that renaissance
psychology focuses not on the genitals but on the stomach, the center of
the digestive (and excretory) system. Where Greenblatt and Miller see the
repression and redirection of sexual energy, Schoenfeldt points out the
careful regulation of body and spirit. Within this framework, the seemingly
ridiculous detail of Guyon's tour of the castle's "back-gate" (2.9.32),
or anus, makes sense; the chief danger to the body lies not in its being
leaky, but in the extremes of it either being stopped up or liquified. Healthy
digestion sorts out nutrients from waste and rids itself of the latter before
it can cause damage. When read through the Castle of Alma, the Bower of
Bliss episode emerges not as a decision between pleasure and control (as
Greenblatt would have it), but as a decision between the immoderate and
short-lived pleasure of the Bower and the pleasure seen in the Castle, which
emerges precisely from control.

While this study works to explain Spenser's seemingly inappropriate exploration
of the body, with Shakespeare it brings to attention the subtle yet ubiquitous
vocabulary of humoral psychology at work in the sonnets. In particular,
Schoenfeldt deals with the critical problem of Sonnet 94, a poem that celebrates
those who contain their emotions and are as unmoved by others as stone.
Modern criticism has generally viewed the poem as ironic, but Schoenfeldt
argues for its sincerity, based on its call for temperate self-control.
Reading it against Sonnet 129 ("Th'expence of Spirit in a waste of shame"),
he finds in it a way out of the tyranny of desire and toward the kingdom
of the self.

The next chapter examines the importance of eating and digestion in the
intensely Eucharistic work of George Herbert by contextualizing the ritual
breaking of bread within common dietary beliefs and practices. Schoenfeldt
demonstrates the palpable materiality of Herbert's Eucharistic language;
he points out, for instance, that the term "spirit" in "The H. Communion"
mediates between body and soul in that it signifies a material substance,
a particularly rarified form of blood produced by digestion and used by
the soul. Body and soul interact tightly: nutrition and affliction occur
in both realms. Within this context, the Eucharist can be seen as a particularly
intense form of digestion, the entry of God into the believer's body and
soul as the ultimate nutritive act.

Whereas Herbert sees the Eucharist as a heightened form of digestion, Milton
dismisses the idea of sacrament in favor of a celebration of the miracle
of digestion itself, which exemplifies the material transformation that
animates his universe. As well, the experience of food becomes "the central
site of pre- and post-lapsarian morality" (131), with meals requiring deeply
introspective choices and constant ethical exercise. As in Herbert, careful
eating results in nutrition, intemperate eating in indigestion and even
death. Attention to digestion literally fleshes out the ideas of interiority
and the individual. Each person must choose what and how much to eat; these
choices in Milton carry heavy consequences. Notably, paradise is both lost
and regained by dietary acts.

On the whole, Schoenfeldt's argument convinces. The study would have benefited,
though, from a more thorough explanation of humoral physiology near its beginning,
perhaps even a page or two spelling out the sanguine, melancholic, choleric,
and phlegmatic personalities to which it often refers--there is plenty of
humoral theory here, but not enough humoral practice for my liking. As well,
while Schoenfeldt explains at length the differences between renaissance concepts
of the body and those of modernity, he passes over questions of what came
before. How exactly did renaissance practices of Galenic physiology differ
from medieval practices of the same? From this angle, it is not entirely clear
what makes these bodies "early modern". Schoenfeldt succeeds at his main project,
though, which is to realign the texts in question within a contemporary physiological
understanding, a process that offers significant insight.

Works Cited

Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines
of Shame in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993.